


Lime

by lvckyphan



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Adopted Children, Adoption, Angst, Blood and Violence, Childhood, Dan Howell/Phil Lester Fluff, Depression, Fame, Gay Male Character, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Philosophy, Postpartum Depression, Sad, YouTuber Dan Howell, YouTuber Phil Lester
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-09 19:23:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13488162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lvckyphan/pseuds/lvckyphan
Summary: PREVIEW“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” — Friedrich Nietzsche.Daniel Howell, ex-internet star and epitome of a modern success story, recounts his life as one half of a wealthy double-act and deceitfully excellent father to a once bubbly and scintillating son. After an inevitable tragedy occurs, the self-made millionaire narrates for the first time the truth in fame and entertainment, in his relationship with partner, Phil Lester, and how what started out as a lie only to remain in the limelight came to such an unfortunate end.





	1. Boombox

**Author's Note:**

> The following is a work of fiction. I’ve never tackled something like this in such depth before and I’m interested to see what it will turn out to look like as a completed project. It’s not a story for the faint-hearted and it will get graphic with descriptions of violence, profanity and death. If you do wish to continue, thank you.
> 
> Whilst the story of Dan and Phil is interesting enough to me to want to write about, I actually wanted to create something that further extended that. Rather than producing an interpretation of what I believe their relationship to be, or what I believe occurred when they met or even what I believe has happened between them each year they’ve posted online, I decided to write about what could happen. And what could _have_ happened, if they simply had seen things a certain way. This is a story not of truth, but of possibility. Fame is something those that see it as black and white desire, and the same goes for affluence. The actions of those that get caught up in it are often either dismissed or scrutinised and we attempt to either relate to or disconnect ourselves from what happens. In this story, there is probably more inhumanity than there is humanity. Things have already gone very wrong and the narrator is unreliable. Dan and Phil are materialistic, money-driven and insensitive. Their characters in this fanfic are representative of those who, in an industry of hypocrisy, become hypocrites. And in an industry of deceit, become liars.
> 
> I hope the question as to who is to blame in the end will haunt you, as I hope the moral Dan comes to will do the same. Exposure is a key theme of the story and, whilst we don’t always like it, we learn from the things we’re exposed to. Sometimes being forced to see things as they are is equally the most important and most horrific thing in the world.

**1\. Boombox**

_I should have been prepared_. In hindsight, I should have been prepared. There are some things that occur in the blink of an eye, in the twitch of a finger or the twist of a muscle that demand us to beg the question, “If I had been elsewhere, would this have still happened?” The answer then usually transcends into a series of follow-ups, that go a little like, “If I hadn’t got up today, would this have still happened? If I hadn’t crossed the road when I did, would this have still happened? If I had answered the call when I should’ve, would this have still happened?” It all boils down to the fact that we, as one, have a tendency to take responsibility for the catastrophes we both did and didn’t create. And that the real question we’ll wake to find washed up on the shore is, “If I had been someone else, would this have still happened?”

For the record, the answer is usually that it wouldn’t have. But that something else would. And that we’re only so much in control of where we end up as we are of where we don’t, and that really isn’t much control at all. But, of course, this is the voice of a guilty conscience. A bleak one at that. Whilst I don’t think I’m in the position to blame somebody else—or even the hostile workings of fate—for what happened, my subconscious will probably continue to.

Bear with me on that.

I’m no professional.

My name is Daniel Howell, and this is the beginning of the novel I swore I’d never write.

It was impossible to predict that I’d end up where I currently sit, typing these words out with lilac eyes and a mug of stale of coffee on my desk. It’s been there for three weeks, but that isn’t the worst of it. That doesn’t even scrape the _surface_ of the worst of it. At this point, ‘Lilac Eyes And Stale Coffee’ is the advertisement for hell. It’s the promotion, the marketing, the headline and the front page and I’m sure I’d surprise myself in how much I’d be willing to pay for that to be the end of it. But it isn’t.

I don’t know at what point it’s most authentic to say this, but I just wanted to note that I’m not writing this for the profit it will inevitably result in. In fact, even the idea of cash being splashed at the story I’m about to recall sickens me to my stomach. I’ve been in the (we’ll call it) ‘entertainment’ industry for a good proportion of my adulthood, the ‘limelight’ since I turned eighteen, and you can bet your life that I know how these things work by now. Which is ironic, since you probably shouldn’t trust me with anything. A lot of you would’ve learnt that the hard way but, then again, it might be the only way. We behave and stay in line, for you like the ones that do. And your approval results in financial aid. Don’t go breaking your hearts over it when it comes out we did it all for the money.

And that, at one point, we couldn’t have given a fuck less about anything else if we tried.

I’ll be honest and admit that this is the most honest I’ve ever been, and I will ever be. You don’t know anything about me and you didn’t know anything about him. I’ll return later to elaborate, but just trust me when I say that money isn’t the answer.

Money is more questions.

I suppose I should start from the beginning anyway, since that’s how we’ll do things around here. Chronologically.

My mother was a philosophy graduate and my father a covert alcoholic. The first thing you should know about my parents (since I rarely spoke about them out of respect for their privacy) is that they were odd. They did odd things, and I was raised in an odd household. My childhood was very theatrical, very extravagant and peculiar but I suppose youth is something we only have an opinion on until we have another’s to compare it to. I remember little of my early childhood, almost as though my memory of the time between birth and age five has been brushed away like little bits of an eraser. I imagine nothing much interesting happened. I mean, I was _born_ , which apparently has done more bad than it has good anyway. In the past, my relatives have referred to me as a ‘serious’ but ‘quietly intelligent’ child that ‘had trouble making decisions’ and ‘communicating feelings.’ Touché.

My family were the first ones to propose the concept of ‘enough’ to me, tossing it into conversations like basketballs across the large courts behind my primary school. My mother was always a very sensitive woman, with a heart that would bend with but an utterance of her name and a kind smile that whimpered to be taken advantage of. My father, if it isn’t already obvious, executed the job perfectly.

I don’t speak to him all that often anymore.

As he’d usually work hours away from home, my mother and I relied on one another for more reasons than one. I grew up with a distaste for him that was only heightened during my adolescence, and I never truly understood why. He knew I didn’t like him though. I swear, he could feel it. And I told him a few times too, but that came later. As a child, I just kept my distance. I preferred to be alone, found myself exhausted in the company of others and figured that if I had to be with anyone, I’d just be with my mother. She was intelligent and spoke a lot, unintentionally reminding people of it, and I liked that. It made it easier for me, though my pressing issue with social interaction didn’t really become a problem until years later. Before the age of ten, I was a happy child. A very happy child. I was excitable and giddy on my feet, excelled at school despite being a heap of constant energy and didn’t really care about what anyone thought of me. Which, of course, was what proved to be fatal when it flipped itself on its head.

Ignorance is bliss.

Some clichés are clichés for a reason.

I always had a hard time believing it when a distant aunt would describe me as ‘serious’, considering I did nothing but amuse and humour. I’ve been through a lot of phases, you know, and it’s goddamn hard to keep up sometimes. But even as young as six or seven, I recall I was an entertainer. This one Christmas, I had a microphone and a sort-of child’s edition of a boombox bought for me and set it up in the living-room to perform a concert to my unamused grandfather on the sofa, staring back at me with these empty eyes that you really had to search to find anything in. Honestly, he was happier than I make him sound. He just didn’t do much. And people who didn’t do much were exceptionally boring to seven-year-old Dan, with those strange blondish curls and weird knitted sweaters. I was the lead in a few school plays, became obsessed with ‘Winnie The Pooh’ and danced my way across the landing to the bathroom every morning. I engaged in thorough conversations with myself because nobody else realised just how much my mother meant it when she said, “God, he’s so precious, but such a handful.”

Ignorance is bliss.

I’ll recycle that phrase.

It’s not uncommon to be nostalgic for what now feel like the first days of your life. I mean, think about it. Don’t you miss it? The ease. The simplicity. The very idea of waking up in the morning and tumbling straight into the thought that _damn, there aren’t enough hours in the day._ And the hours never were occupied with the same kind-of productivity, but they were productive nevertheless. They were always productive, for ‘productive’ in the first days of your life was synonymous with ‘creative’ and, holy fuck, you were creative. You were creative with no intention of being. Creative with no boundaries. Creative with no price. Finger-painted smiles and necklaces made of beads slipped onto loose string and comic book pages that tore too easily and friends who didn’t look at you like there was something missing. I didn’t need friends, and the lack therefore of didn’t bother me.

In ways, I just think I fascinated myself. Or, rather, knew of things that did because I was so sure of myself. And it isn’t time yet to take coins out of the pockets of my ego’s corpse, but I will say that I was a piece of work as a youngster. I really was something. And the only reason I’m even acknowledging that now is because this was before ‘something’ was something to be ashamed of. Before it was an act, before it was a game, before I played a character so flawlessly that I lost touch with the actor and didn’t even mind. And it’s a funny old thing, change, how we can walk through a storm and not realise the heavens are pouring until someone points out that we’ll get sick if we keep going.

It’s funny.

My father was very much background music for me. Throughout most of my childhood, he was painted somewhere into the landscape, always holding a bottle of liquor in family photographs and, really, there only to proclaim that he hadn’t had too much to drive home. He worked in special effects and offered to take me out places regularly but I usually refused, just accepting if it was a movie set or something that evoked a sense of that childish kind-of ‘cool.’ We didn’t spend a lot of time together.

He was dad, but he could’ve done better.

We probably all could.

When my brother Adrian was born, my father had had just about enough of trying to work with me. He just didn’t get me, and I didn’t _want_ to get him. It was always just much easier for us to keep our distance and use my mother as a sort-of safe haven, as a way to communicate without really communicating. Adrian was a difficult baby, but sweeter than I’d ever been. He was my father’s son, everyone said. Looked like him, laughed like him, clung to him and adored him, even though the man had done nothing to warrant being adored. The way I saw it, my mother had raised me. My father had simply watched from the sidelines. Looking back on my early childhood, it seems we just didn’t have a lot in common. And he struggled to connect with me because I wasn’t willing to connect with him, or even so much as budge when he pulled the strings for me to move with him. He’d say that I was difficult too, but I never misbehaved like Adrian. He was my dad’s favourite and that was okay, like, until it wasn’t. Until it became an excuse disguised as justification, a reason for doing things I should never have done in my adolescence.

Those years were messy.

Messier than I ever cared to admit until now.

I didn’t ever speak publicly about Adrian, for obvious reasons. That was made impossible. Don’t complain of knowing little about your idol’s past when the very mention of it sparked havoc, inflicted damage that appeared in bruises some of us have still never learnt to conceal. Actions have consequences and we’re better off just remembering that, rather than having to be reminded of it. I realised after some time in front of the camera that I’d trained myself to know the difference between it being on and off, between what I should take note of and what I shouldn’t. More often than you’d think, my family were victims of my success. And after such time of contemplation, I realise now that it was probably my fault. But what I keep stressing to myself at this desk is that it doesn’t matter, nothing really does, from the stale coffee to the price I’ve had to pay for every goddamn time I, too, have had to be reminded that actions have consequences.

My mother suffered postnatal depression when Adrian was born. It’s a fuck of a disease. My grandmother effectively coined it ‘baby blues’ and a lot of doctors ‘very complicated’ and even though my father tried, he didn’t make it any easier. He just didn’t understand. And that’s something I’ve learnt—and I hope you soon will too—not to lose myself in anger over. Because if we earned pennies for every time an issue of this magnitude was misunderstood, money would mean nothing. And we’d all feel worse than we already do. I’ve learnt that sometimes people just don’t understand and, whilst their best isn’t nearly enough, it’s still their best. My father did his best. Regarding my mother’s depression, I don’t have a bad word to say about him. He tried. There’d be days when she couldn’t get out of bed, weeks when she wouldn’t eat and months when she wouldn’t shower and my dad would always be there to hold her when she cried, despite usually turning to liquor on the days she’d mutter, “I don’t feel anything at all.” She’d always say that she felt like she couldn’t cope, that nothing was everything and Adrian deserved more. What you have to understand about her isn’t that she was a good mother, but that she took pride in being one. And it was almost an identity for her.

I don’t know exactly when my ‘downward spiral’ began but, after years of compiled conversations with therapists, I’d take a guess at age twelve. That was a fucking state of a year. I went through a phase of sleep paralysis and struggled to settle in at my new school. I hated the uniform and I hated the kids. Nobody wanted to talk to me and, for the first time in my life, that bothered me. I hated it. What with the lack of significant attention at home, the growing pressure of schoolwork and the future and coming to the realisation more than once that I didn’t know who I was, my self-esteem started to cave. I wasn’t getting any sleep and found even the idea of opening up nauseating. My mother was the first to notice that something was wrong, querying why I wasn’t leaving my bedroom as often or really engaging in conversation. I didn’t want to talk about it. I shut my mouth and got on with it. Ignoring the problem when the problem cannot be ignored is a problem within itself, but I wasn’t willing to share how I was feeling. I think now it was probably just because I didn’t _know_ how I was feeling, and so became a very strict introvert with a plethora of thoughts I couldn’t put words to.

We went on a few vacations that year, visiting a foreign country or two in the summer holidays. My parents deserved the break and I was still passive enough to go along with it without putting up a fight. This period of my life is really hard to explain. I wasn’t lifeless, but was perfectly content not doing anything but sitting alone and staring into a void before me. I was stripped of all qualities and characteristics I’d developed as a child, and it felt like somebody had cut me open and taken it all out. I was an onlooker, an outsider, cowering away from attention and behaving less like _Dan_ than I ever had before.

It was just the age, they said. And it probably was to begin with.

I started listening to a lot of new music in an indirect attempt to feel like I fit in somewhere, asking for all these CDs that sounded pretty much the same. In my nightmares, I was always the victim. And there was a blackness to them that reality couldn’t yet compete with. Twelve was the age I had my last small group of nerdy friends and created my own website, that would come to contribute more to the later ‘danisnotonfire’ than the younger one could ever have imagined. It’s dead now, anyway. We had to put it to rest years ago. But for those who are familiar with it, I guess it was an accurate representation of twelve-year-old me. It was the dumbest creative thing I could do with the computer my parents bought me.

Sometimes I think about that computer, the first one I ever owned that weighed a fucking ton and sat there like a white robot on my desk, and whether or not my parents ever really regretted buying it. We were spoilt kids, Adrian and I. Someone of my age didn’t need a computer for anything in particular, but my mother must’ve just figured it would’ve given me something to do. And, sure, I know there were moments she definitely regretted allowing me access to everything that computer opened up for me but these moments were just the product of irritation and concern, when she claimed I spent too much time staring at the screen. I don’t know if she ever sat in a state of confusion years later, wondering what the fuck had happened to me and tracing everything that had gone wrong back to that computer.

I bet she did.

She always blamed herself.

At thirteen, I layered my bedroom walls with punk-rock posters and bought a lot of black merchandise. When asked, my parents would refer to me as ‘a natural geographer and potential philosopher’ who ‘had a knack for critical thinking.’ But I didn’t believe in myself enough. And I grew very distant from the few friends I had, remained an introvert with nothing inside them but the air that occupied the space tightened like an angry fist and I suddenly had these cold eyes with this scowl ready to murder any trace of a good time. I was the cruelest fucking kid you’d ever meet. My relationship with my father started to get worse, and I spent too much time in my room. I never felt that sense of belonging wherever I went, almost as though I wasn’t really supposed to be anywhere. And it’s not easy to explain what that feels like. It’s not easy to explain at all. There’s this constant expectancy that stirs in your stomach, this long to know not who you are but who you’re supposed to be and you walk the line between feeling like the world is against you and knowing it doesn’t really give a shit at all.

Sometimes I think I was angry just because it was something to do. And it gave me a reason to explain why it seemed like nobody liked me, or something. Because it seemed like they didn’t.

At this age, I slacked off at school and wasted hours playing video games behind closed blinds and big electricity bills. My mother worried a lot. She was always a worrier. There’d be times when she’d lose her temper with me just because I was fucking impossible and my father would always be there to scold me for it. I wish he had been as understanding as she herself had tried to be, but they were very different people. Drastic changes in a teenager’s personality usually derive from remoulded friendship groups, from excessive peer pressure and difficulties with hormones. And whilst there’s truth in that the majority of the time, sometimes there’s exceptions. And the drastic changes in my personality were a product of social withdrawal and my parents’ issues with one another and the fact that my identity had become like the newspaper print on the inside of my grandfather’s thumbs, all vague and blurry and unsure of itself. Whilst once it had been black and white, at thirteen and fourteen it was more grey than anything else and I just didn’t _fit_ anywhere, I just didn’t _make sense_ anywhere.

This isn’t the story of my parents, but I’m not even sure it’s my story. And I’m not even sure it can be if the beginning doesn’t heavily involve them. Their marriage weakened in these places. It had always been frail around the edges, my grandmother used to say, but they became less certain of each other and more of their pastimes. Sometimes they yelled. Sometimes they didn’t speak at all. I grew up in Berkshire, on a quiet street in Wokingham in which the neighbours spoke politely and the hedges were always clipped and my mother often said she didn’t belong there, even though my father was the one that still appeared lost wherever he’d end up. That was probably the alcohol, though. But regardless, they fought it out a lot during my adolescence. Packing up. Moving house. The truth was, neither of them knew where they wanted to be. And Adrian and I felt that.

My teenage years were the hardest. It’s remarkable I’ve held that opinion since I left them, considering the shit I’ve been through. But I just hated it. I just hated everything about it. I made my mother’s home life hell, and it wasn’t like my father had ever known any different. My grandmother sat and spoke with me on a few occasions, but I ignored any word she had to say and that probably just about fucked up our relationship too. I don’t know whether I was depressed at this point exactly—even though, admittedly, it is probable—but I did suffer a complete identity crisis. I used insults and sarcasm to get by. The kids at school were all right. My parents didn’t understand. I was never going to amount to anything. I wasn’t smart enough. I had to lose weight. Self-destruction was interesting. Boys were nice.

There’s a lot there I have to return to. Probably the most relevant thing right now in continuing the story, however, is that I got knee-fucking-deep in the internet.

In the nineties, chatrooms were the shit. Forums were popular when I was a teen, too. Being so interested in video games, I’d spend hours on there, surfing the web for codes and cheats and unintentionally inviting my first couple thousand viruses onto my desktop. I was dumb, but it’s nostalgic to think back on. YouTube began as a video sharing site back in two thousand and five and, by the end of the year, was getting millions of views every day. As an avid internet user, it was difficult to avoid. Everyone visited the site at some point or another and I became a pretty frequent viewer over the course of a year or two.

What’s difficult to explain here is my fondness for it. My fondness for the website and my fondness for the internet and my fondness for this period of my life. I shouldn’t feel anything but animosity towards it, for this was the beginning of everything and ‘everything’ is such a general term that it’s basically synonymous with ‘the future’ and the future was nothing like it should have been. The future will never end up being anything like it should be, I know that now. But I have a strange kind-of yearning for this part of my life, almost as though I see myself as a home before a hurricane. A child before their first curse word. Ignorance is bliss and though I wasn’t fucking innocent, I was closer to naive than I was to worldly and I made a lot of mistakes that became the subject of later amusement but now aren’t really embarrassing at all. They’re more sentimental than anything else. I feel the same way about them as I do my mother in the days before she got sick, as I do about the boombox I had when I was six and I do about ‘Winnie The Pooh’ playing on the television screen.

I miss webpages working slow and pixels of pirated movies glitching out. I miss first-person shooters and the best albums ever released and creative content creators that uploaded in the name of entertainment, not profit. I miss Pokémon cards, capsule toys in gumball machines, ‘Sonic’ and ‘Guitar Hero’ and hiatuses between ‘Harry Potter’ movies that each felt like individual lifetimes.

Beginning YouTube was single-handedly the worst decision I ever made. We met in late two thousand and nine, but there’s a little bit before that. I imagine everyone knows how it goes from here on out anyway. Or, like, you think you do. Ignorance is bliss. And we were always in a position to get more than we gave, even though we never planned on any of it. I didn’t ask for what happened to happen. And more often than you’d think, I was a victim of my own success. 

But after such time of contemplation, I realise now that it was probably my fault.

It doesn’t matter that I never _meant_ to hurt anyone.

I did.


	2. Firewall

**2\. Firewall**

_When I met Phil, I was eighteen_. I’d been on the Internet for a while and a frequent viewer of his for almost just as long. Whilst the immediate attraction was the man’s creativity, I later became physically and emotionally attracted to his persona. He broadcasted the kind-of genuine others lacked, this authenticity that spoke volumes on his selfless nature. To me, he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t like them at all. Although YouTube wasn’t yet regarded a profession founded on the basis of fabrication and hypocrisy, most of the others just appeared false and unappealing to my adolescent self. I had very little interest in those also posting regularly, and there came a time I only opened up the website to watch his catalogue of work. ‘AmazingPhil’ was a character associated in my mind with honesty and contentment, with goodwill and compassion and this feeling of attachment I had to a person on the other side of a screen wasn’t particularly something many had experienced, but it was real nevertheless. He made me smile, he made me laugh, he was dumb and I was fond and we’d never met but we didn’t have to—as I understood it—for him to resonate with me.

Phil was born in January nineteen eighty seven to a mother, a father and an older brother and spent his childhood in a quaint Lancashire home. The fact he was a strange child was always well documented online. Actually, one of the first conversations we ever had was about metallic green envelopes.

(Which is a reference, if you don’t already know. For some reason, the envelopes happened to come up a lot with us.)

I know a lot about Phil’s childhood, for he’d always talk to me about it to pass the time on flights or trips through the city. It was never relevant, but he made it so. He had a knack for that. As a kid, he was creative, and grew up with aspirations to be a movie director. They’d call him a dreamer, or something, the one with his head in the clouds and his feet off the ground but, goddamn, he was going places. They’d say that, too. Not that he was clever, but that he knew what he was doing. There’s a difference between intelligence and common sense and Phil had such an excessive amount of the latter that all else just didn’t matter so much. It didn’t have to.

But even so, he was intelligent. The sometimes-dopey and often-childish traits he displayed were part of the act, although ‘AmazingPhil’ wasn’t entirely false. The first thing you should know about the Phil Lester I knew was that he was an optimist, and he was a damn good one at that. The sun rose in the morning and set in the evening—disappearing in a shimmer of orange flames—and all that came between was premeditated. Phil was a believer of fate and inevitability and the notion that everything happened for a reason, whereas I believed there was a reason why everything happened.

They sound the same, but they’re not.

Believing everything happens for a reason is just the same as believing there’s always a silver lining. Phil used to say that I was such a pessimist, I could drive Mr. Happy to suicide. You know, that old ‘Mr. Men’ character? The yellow one with the boring cyclical shape and grin up to his ears. He was my least favourite as a child, so Phil probably had a point. I mean, he usually did. But on the subject of pessimism and my early years, I was Eeyore to him. Why he took to nicknaming me after Pooh Bear is beyond me.

Before we met, we messaged online. We were internet friends, which is a term used frequently amongst teens these days but it wasn’t as common back then. It wasn’t as dangerous, or even as simple. I was lingering somewhere in that awkward phase between high school graduation and college entry. Phil was posting a lot about his attendance at the University of York, studying visual effects and postproduction after completing a degree in English Language. There was a bit of theatre tossed in there somewhere, too. When I mentioned previously that he was intelligent, I meant it, but he was also a person easily-committed. If he wanted to do something, he wouldn’t settle for any less unless the less was just as good.

What’s strange about the early days of Phil and I— ‘phan’, if you would so kindly appreciate, will again retire to the form of reference rather than direct address for the I-don’t-care-to-name time in my career—is that I knew him before he knew me. And that usually doesn’t apply to relationships we share with people, for when we meet, we meet, and there’s nothing else to it. Before I even created a YouTube account with the original sole purpose of giving this ‘AmazingPhil’ feedback, I was glued to his every move. Not just his videos, but his social media. His presence on every platform of the internet. I was his friend before he was mine, it always felt like, and that’s a phrase I recited to him countless times.

Those not accustomed to idols or role models, or part of a group or a clique, or invested in friends or sick of being left behind or aware of the sheer selfishness of humanity, I fucking salute you. You’re doing someone right. And, by that, I mean you’re ignorant but that will never be an insult in the pages of this novel. You’re, like, the introverts that don’t know they’re introverts or something. You’re, like, the ones who don’t care. And whilst apathy, admittedly, isn’t something I envy, to care even a little less is something I do. I’m one of the many who have lost themselves to bits and pieces of other people, to arches of eyebrows and snide remarks and empty smiles we give just to give them because we’re told maybe they’ll work. I’m not a fucking philosopher and I don’t mean to live up to my parents’ words, but maybe I have to in conveying the point of my irrelevancy. I’m just one in a million lost in webpage links and karma donations and usernames concealing everything there is to a person because we’re taught to be frightened of the truth.

As an adolescent, I lost myself to these things. I lost myself to earbuds and awkward glances and rigid postures. I lost myself to the fear of being uncomfortable. I lost myself to music, to video games and the internet and, in turn, Phil Lester. Or his username, in fact. His persona.

When Phil and I would talk about the fact I’d known him longer than he’d known me, we’d always come to the conclusion that I didn’t know him at all. And that the moment I first started to understand who he was was the same moment he did me, when he told me that first time we talked he liked dogs and ‘Muse’ and wanted to direct a movie someday, even though he’d already acted in one. I asked questions and he responded, about concerts and videos and how the future looked for him. I remember he said it wasn’t looking great, because he said the same thing again just last year.

“Everything’ll be fine,” I told him. Last year, when everything wasn’t. “Please, Phil. Just trust me, okay? Everything’ll be fine.”

The first time we talked, I played dumb about the University he attended. I played dumb about the names of his friends. I played dumb about his video titles. I played dumb about his favourite things. I listened, which apparently was something I’d developed an excellency in during my adolescence, and he didn’t mind talking. He was naturally altruistic and he’d done enough in the last _week_ of his life to entertain an hour of conversation, so it wasn’t an exhausting thing for him to find something to say.

It seemed like—and I’ll remember the feeling forever—I was the first person in a long time that had showed an interest Phil didn’t doubt the authenticity of. We clicked because we both had a reason to come back and start up another conversation and, for why ever it may have been, that was new to both of us. There wasn’t and hadn’t ever been a Dan in Phil’s life, and there wasn’t and hadn’t ever been a Phil in mine. Sometimes people just tumble into the places they fit the easiest, move inside the crevices they work the best and even though it isn’t always what we should do, we cling to the people that give us some idea as to who we are. You might not think it, but we do. And I knew a Phil in my primary school when I was six-years-old, but I don’t associate him with Phil Lester. It’s bizarre, isn’t it? It’s bizarre how things like that work. When I think of that six-year-old Phil, I think of my boombox. My grandfather and Saturday cartoons. What I’m getting at here is that we identify ourselves as a name we don’t choose, and yet everybody else identifies us as the moments we were relevant in their lives.

And that just seems so strange to me.

Around the time Phil Lester and I started talking, I was dating a girl. She was good to me and I think about her a lot. I won’t mention her name (simply because we’re not in contact anymore and I don’t have the patience for legal requirements) but I will say that she was important. Of course, she wasn’t the first girl I’d ever had _feelings_ for but she was the first girl I’d ever dated. As a young child, all my crushes had been female. I don’t know whether that was just because it felt comfortable and correct to me, or whether I genuinely was only attracted to girls and I suppose I never will. Still, this particular girl was my first and only girlfriend. At seventeen, I was so unsure of myself that I couldn’t bear even to stare myself down in the reflection of my phone screen. I had a lot of issues with confidence and self-esteem. My father didn’t care as much as he should’ve, and I didn’t know as much as I felt I was supposed to about myself.

This girl and I dated for a few months. I think it was about four or five, but the memory’s foggy. At this time, I was the most difficult I’d ever been and, honestly, I wouldn’t have dated that Dan kid if you’d have paid me all the money in the world. I masked insecurity with selfishness, which was the same selfishness that motivated my later greed. I’ve never spoken of this before now, but I developed some sort-of an eating disorder. Some sort-of dysmorphia with my body. The simple things irritated me. The complicated even more so. I wasn’t smart enough for courses. I wasn’t cool enough for drugs. I wasn’t pretty enough for modelling. I gave up searching on end for that spark of passion I was supposed to have for something, anything, and became simply a creature of habit, inclined to do only the things expected of me to an occasionally above average degree. 

I dated a girl because it was easy. And I was a teenager, and I wanted to make sense. I studied law at college because my parents thought it was something I was capable of. In the same way ‘enough’ had haunted the depths of my childhood, ‘potential’ haunted the depths of adolescence. It moved silently, rushed down over my skin like soapy water in the shower and pooled around my ankles where I’d grounded my feet. There was a lot of things I could have been, a lot of things I could have done and I wasn’t and didn’t do any of them. I was in a pursuit of feeling—substance and definition rather than success—and being in a relationship gave me a form of identification to toss under the noses of those looking down and claiming, “Well, it would do you good to get your shit together.”

I _had_ my shit together.

I mean, I didn’t. But there was no proof of that.

My relationship with said girl grew stormy and complicated, the sky polluted and horizon blackened with a disgusting fate. I smoked a few cigarettes in the first days after high school, and urged her to do the same. By the time we ended it, she was an addict. I called her names and crushed her dignity under the heel of my shoe. She was smart but terribly naive, and I had a dirty self-aversion hungry for another’s emotion. I was no longer a figment of fascination to myself but instead the very state of boredom and apathy, and I decided to take must be a better option than to give considering I had nothing left to give at all. So I took and took, spat and hissed and used and lied and sniggered and snickered in the face of pure sense.

I ruined the ones I cared for.

Apparently, I have a tendency to do that.

The internet was a witness to the complete catastrophe of mistakes I made and the enemies of mine that derived from that period of my life did more right than wrong. You should know that. Of course, I was struggling, but the older I get the more I realise that sometimes suffering isn’t an excuse to inflict more. The difficult amongst us have known difficulty to a greater extent than they’ll ever care to admit and, whilst it’s true that we’re likely to become the things we see just as much as the things we think about, I’m not sure I should use such phrasing so explicitly in the story of my life. Actions have consequences, and we’re responsible for the footprints if we decide to walk through the paint.

You’re not the only one who finds it ironic I’m preaching this, by the way. The majority of these words will be laden with irony, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary to say.

The night she ended it with me, I got drunk. I got so drunk that I couldn’t see straight and left her house for mine, but never managed to make it back. My mother called me a thousand times. Adrian said he was worried sick. My father didn’t look at me for a few weeks. I woke up on a bench in a little park opposite my high school, on a brisk Monday morning with the smell of rain in the air and a bottle of rum at my feet. I reeked of stale liquor and I’d never vomited as hard as I did when I returned home and puked an hour later. When I awoke on that bench, it wasn’t to my first hangover. But it was to teenagers dressed in the uniform I, too, had worn every weekday for five years of my life. It was to the sudden conscious thought that I wasn’t going anywhere, that the sun was bright and my bottle of rum empty and life just very, very pointless.

It was an epiphany of some sort.

That same day, I sat with my mother in our kitchen and promised her I’d go to college. She said it was the best place for me, and I agreed because there was nothing else to do. She said she didn’t want me to drink so much again and wanted to see me eat more and hoped I knew that she was there if I wanted to talk. When these kind of things are proposed to you, you generally just accept them. From that day forward, I lived in the name of doing shit for the sake of it. Though it may not mean anything, I might as well.

And I think, however pretentious, that we’re all so terribly concerned with having a reason, we forget that why we do things doesn’t matter as much as the fact we do them. In the grand scheme of things, we don’t leave behind a motive, but a sentence. And so we get up and we eat, and we shower and we sleep and we work and we drive and we cry and we think and we ignore the fact that most of the time we don’t have an answer to the question as to why we do it at all. But I just think it’s easier when everything is made simple.

At eighteen, I was in a position to ask Phil Lester questions.

I was sad and I was tired.

“Why do you waste your time?”

He wouldn’t now, but then he smiled. And he said, “I don’t know, Dan. Because I might as well.”

Nothing ever happened at college and, of course, I didn’t enjoy law. It was so boring and I didn’t attend classes half the time. As young and unpopular as I was, I got pissed a lot. My mother’s words never did seal a deal for me. The workload was heavy and I was in a perpetual state of needing release, so alcohol was my remedy.

But anyway, before college even came onto the scene, Phil and I talked a lot. In the beginning, it wasn’t anything outside of potential content ideas and _genuine_ editing tips (yes, I swear to God) and, “Phil, that’s _such_ a cool concept. Make the video, make it now. I want to watch.” We talked about music a lot—swore that one day we’d attend a concert together—and he was always thanking me for my continual support. I’ll be the first to admit that it was a strange friendship. If ever I brought Phil up to my mother, she’d refer to us as unlikely friends. And though I don’t know exactly how much our connection was unlikely, the circumstances certainly were.

On the internet in the years after our success, people have claimed our reality to be a fairytale. Whilst that is simply just false for reasons that will soon become obvious, I’m amongst those of you that see the outset of Phil and I as almost-too-good-to-be-true.

Again, ironic. Everything always _is_ too good to be true but if I could return to any day of my life, it would be to the day I met Phil. Which is, effectively, me signing myself off to say that I’d do it all over again. And I would for him. I would for that time. I’d do fucking anything for those days back, you know, for his voice down the receiver in the lonely hours and his breath on the nape of my neck and when the way his heart rate changed when he fell asleep was the most important thing in the world. Before we even met, our friendship fizzled out into a blur of feelings and inappropriate but inevitable fondness kept neatly in compact chat logs and accidentally deleted messages. With Phil, everything was easy. He was the only easy thing in my life. And, naturally, that made him the best. He was my pastime, my passion, my good morning and goodnight and my reason to get up when there was no other reason at all. When we’d talk, it would be about stupid things. And he’d inadvertently make me feel good about myself when he’d tell me I didn’t deserve the things they’d said.

Our messages were random and sappy, our conversations longwinded and unimportant to anyone other than ourselves. Phil would talk about the universe and I would talk about philosophy. And Phil would talk about his brother and I would talk about mine. And he’d tell me he believed in crazy things, like aliens and peaceful solitude and good things that didn’t end. He’d tell me when his parents fought and when he got recognised once at ‘Disney Land’ and how he considered it important to smile at the things not willing to smile back at him. In ways, Phil was the same person to me that I was to him. We were meaning in the sense of nothing but our existence.

I think I’ve reached the point of this, even in its entirety, most difficult to put words to. Conveying the importance of Phil to me as an unstable and sometimes reckless teenager seems impossible or, failing that, just too complex for a guy of my capability to eloquently articulate. I said stupid things and he said wise and I used harsh words and he used kind. He didn’t push, didn’t mock, rarely cursed and used this tone that spoke volumes itself on his mild nature. He was the kind-of person I’d both never admit to needing and never believe I could.

But he changed my life, Phil Lester, and whether or not for better or worse in the end, he’s the only one that ever did.

Now plagued with the responsibility of being completely honest, this whole thing is much harder. I have to ensure I don’t leave out the most relevant parts, or whatever.

I started developing feelings for Phil a while after it became more about flirtation than general conversation. I grew up around people frequently cold, serious at fleeting intervals for no apparent reason and bleeding apathy all over my boyhood delight. Phil was so different, it was remarkable. We came from almost opposite backgrounds, from opposite ends of the country with opposite intentions and opposite expectancies of the world around us. I understood more about myself when I was with Phil than I did when I wasn’t, for he was the one closest to me and yet the one furthest away. I understand that this is just dripping with clichés like ice-cream from the fucking cone in the heat of a summer afternoon but, again, some clichés are clichés for a reason.

Some things have to be said.

And there are articles and there are writings and there are touches of paint to a sketch of two lovers in the year of two thousand and nine but none of them could ever really communicate what it felt like to fall in love in the way that we did. Stripped of all romanticism and stripped of all stardom, I was just Dan and he was just Phil and we were just kids with the world at our feet. I was intelligent and he was creative and ‘potential’ loomed in the passings of silence but we didn’t think for a fucking second we were going anywhere. And, if we were, it wasn’t with each other. If we were, it couldn’t possibly be with each other. When you wrote the fiction, you forgot that at some point it had been fact. You forgot that our reality was in the remnants of paint left in your palette and in the final period concluding your one-hundred-and-something-thousand-words. There’s no one particularly to blame, but our best days became a subject of artwork we didn’t consent to—and, granted, didn’t mind—and an argument against the belief they just spewed bullshit in fairytales.

Kids, they _do_ spew bullshit.

We _all_ spew bullshit.

We didn’t kiss for the first time in a station or a cable car. His lips weren’t warm and he didn’t taste like mint. He no longer smells like home to me because I don’t remember what he smelt like in those first few months of everything.

We were meaning in the sense of nothing but our existence.

The silence was comfortable and his mattress was hard. When I couldn’t sleep, he’d call me up and talk until the early hours, and I’d listen until my eyes stung and, in the morning, he’d always be gone. I let him believe that it was possible not to adore the bones of the one whose whisper was more than anything anyone else was willing to give because we weren’t characters in a novel and we were never going to smile under floodlights. There would never be an audience, never be a crowd, and there would never be an opportunity to throw money at the problem. The cameras were off, the tabs were shut down and everything was so fucking _simple_ , it was all just so fucking _simple_. Privacy was drawn curtains and faces peeking out of bedsheets. It was a closed bedroom door and posters all over the walls and I don’t know enough words to express how little words can express what I felt for him before the world threw stones at the glass and we opened the window.

It was quiet when I fell in love with Phil, like the sound of being awake to see the first glimpses of sunlight. My head was loud but my feelings were not, and how tender it all was was too frightened itself to be frightening. The air smelled like a storm but no rain had yet fallen and the sun wasn’t hot enough to leave burned flesh in its wake. We were so young and it was impossible to understand what we were getting ourselves into. It was the age of enchantment disguised as bewilderment and when the things we thought we believed about the children we used to be became the things they’d just told us to get us to the point we were at. As I understood it, what Phil and I had was just confusion. We were friends that felt too much and that’s all we ever would be.

When we arranged to meet in Manchester, I was the sickly kind-of nervous. My mother was so worried for me travelling alone that she insisted on waving me off at the station and made me promise to call her upon arrival. I was still the child to her that she could have done better with, that lived in the shadow of the mistakes she both did and didn’t make and in the constant pressing concern she’d never forgive herself if something happened to me. Because so much already had, and so much was still going to. Somehow, I think she knew that better than I ever could in the naive head I had on my shoulders. Watching me depart on that train to the middle of nowhere wearing the mask of a fucking destiny must have made her feel so helpless and whilst now it’s just a symbol of where everything went wrong, back then I had so little of an idea as to what I was doing.

Meeting Phil was terrifying. The thrill of it was like the kick of an Class A drug and the high didn’t wear off for weeks, even _months_ on end. In the station, nobody recognised him and nobody recognised us as he put his arm around my shoulders and told me he couldn’t believe it or something, though even that’s a blur to me now. I probably said that I couldn’t either, if I said anything at all. I remember I didn’t have any breath and my heart had left my chest for my throat. That day, we talked a lot and the world span too quickly. Time moved too fast for either one of us to keep up. We didn’t address the times I’d cried to him down the phone and we didn’t address the way I looked at him when he told me I was his favourite person in the world.

We recorded our first video together the day after meeting in Manchester and promised one another we’d make more. We just worked, Phil and I, were meaning in the sense of nothing but our existence and I was more comfortable with the idea of being with him than I was with the idea of being attracted to guys. Which I’m aware doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s true nevertheless.

Everything was just different with him.

The first few months were the best of our time together. In fact, they remain the best few months of my life. By this point, I had my own YouTube channel and was creating content at the same rate as Phil. I wasn’t in love with him, but I was infatuated. I say this because it didn’t last. And I’d do so much differently if given a second chance, as I know Phil would too. I know we all would. The fact we can’t undo the things that have already been done proves to be an example of why life just isn’t fair, and why we can’t patch up our mistakes but instead only learn from them.

YouTube was background music before it was the stage. We weren’t actors, just kids, and our shit was our shit and there was nothing else to it.

It was always so cold in his bedroom, but we kept ourselves warm. Christmas came and we went barefoot in the snow and my eyes were so callow and he kissed me without asking and I said that I didn’t mind because I never did at all. His hands were cold where once they were pale and crimson blanched out from his nose across his cheeks and I realised in the haze of the harshest fucking winter that I was suddenly everything to him he had always only been for me. The touches were discreet and the messages discarded on previously pointless social medias were careless and sentimental and I get that we should’ve given a shit but we just didn’t think we’d ever have to.

We were friends that felt too much.

We were always just friends that felt too much.

His parents were polite to me and I felt at home in their company. We shared a bed a lot. We ate out together all the time. I don’t think at any point Phil and I were able to decode our relationship to answer the question of whether we’d never dated, or always had. To this day, it’s a difficult one to work out. And what we felt for each other didn’t become a problem until we could no longer ignore it and the hands started ticking and the numbers started growing and I didn’t want to do college anymore because college was fucking boring. College was the easy option, and Phil said that I was better than that. He said he knew I could do more than that and if I trusted him, I should put myself first. I wasn’t in any kind-of mental state to tackle the pressure of exams or of making new friends and I was worth more than just what people thought I could do because that same thing was holding me back.

You’d think it would be simple, wouldn’t you?

It sounds so fucking straightforward.

But, in fact, we treated it as though it was _too_ straightforward. Didn’t cover our tracks, didn’t watch our backs, didn’t look over our shoulders or turn the lights off and suddenly these were fucking problems we actually had to face. Of course, we didn’t, but both Phil and I had been cowardly children. We’d been kicked into shape and demanded to follow suit. We covered our eyes when things went wrong and were believers of the notion if we didn’t talk about it, it just didn’t exist.

So we kept quiet.

And two thousand and ten was the year of make-believe, the year we let ourselves believe that we were as comfortable with the world as we were with each other like a twisted mockery of being everything to a lover. It was still easy then, but there was a difference between that year and the previous. You asked questions in two thousand and ten—questions you hadn’t before asked and questions we didn’t understand yet how to answer—about the way Phil’s fingers fit around my knee on flights, and the way my heart sounded in my chest when we sat that bit too close together. These were the things you weren’t supposed to notice and these were the years everything that could be genuine in the world was. Nothing was double-sided, nothing was false or deceiving. We were stupid and I’ll fucking admit it, and I’ll say it with a voice so loud that it overshadows the sound of your bullshit remarks of too much and too little. Of content preferences and censored curse words because what _you_ didn’t like, _we_ didn’t do.

How pathetic, you say.

We were our own people, you say.

Fuck yourself.

We were what you wanted us to be.

And, quite frankly, creativity became business. Higher education became hobbies and hobbies became careers. I started too young and submerged myself completely in the fact that I was a pretentious little shit with no real reason to get out of bed in the morning but strangers at the other end of a screen. To me in my haze of meaningless, that was meaning. I had no recognition of ‘superficial’ meaning at this point.

We visited Jamaica and became regular faces in one another’s videos. I grew closer to Chris and PJ, and the friendships I shared with the pair of them differed to the ones I’d known throughout high school. It’s been years since they gave this up and years I spoke to either, but it’s important to me they know—wherever they are and whatever they’re doing—that I miss them. And that they deserved better than the way I once believed they deserved to be treated and that they could never quite comprehend how relevant they were to me in realising the value of connection. Some people stumble upon others at very odd times in their lives for no reason other than a twist of fate but these boys were my friends before I even knew what that meant and I know there’s a retired optimist in me somewhere that agrees with my old Phil’s philosophy, “Everything happens for a reason.”

The sun rose in the morning and set in the evening—disappearing in a shimmer of orange flames—and all that came between was premeditated. Chris and PJ would have done anything to see Phil and I happy. Failing that, they’d have done anything to see me happy. As an individual, standing on my own two feet. They saw a possibility of me existing independently and though once I didn’t understand how important that was, I swear I see it now. We’re winners and losers—fighters and failures and liars and cheaters and lonely and empty and fragile and flimsy—all of our own accord.

Phil and I were different people to the ones we’d been just a mere few months ago. Everything was changing and we saw this, but we didn’t know something could be done about it. We didn’t even think we _wanted_ to do anything because who would be dumb enough take a step back when there was nowhere to step to?

By two thousand and eleven, we’d made the decision to move in with one another. Manchester was special, in ways silently understood. The flat was small and the prices suddenly, it seemed, also but we were still too cautious on our feet to walk with any confidence. We didn’t purchase particularly expensive clothes and we saved cash up in bank accounts, for the sole purpose of anything ever going wrong. That was still a precaution we felt we had to take, which I think speak volumes on our attitudes then in itself.

YouTube was growing not only as a website but as a business deal. It exceeded the point of being hard to avoid and became, instead, impossible. The internet was a lifestyle. I still couldn’t handle education. Sexuality was as much an addition to our videos as we were.

At some point, I dropped out of studies. And I cut and edited together a few videos on what it meant to be happy, and sat back with the most ironic sense of self-satisfaction you could imagine. Phil never chose to critique over to support because he was still just too kind, and I doubt I’d have even believed him if he’d have told me I knew about as much about being happy as I did about what I wanted from life. Our relationship wasn’t what it used to be, but it wasn’t a struggle at all. We were close—in a sense, closer than we’d ever been—and we felt everything we always had for one another and more. In two thousand and eleven, we first became a duo. A pairing. To the world, we weren’t separate but together and I truly was as uncomfortable with that as I looked like I was. But Phil kissed me in the quiet hours of early weekend mornings, kept the cameras on the bedside when he brushed my fringe out of my eyes and his voice returned to that whisper it had been back down the dead line in two thousand and nine.

He was my best friend.

And that’s something I don’t know how to honestly portray because I fear honesty cannot be portrayed in a pathetic tale of such fame and deception. Granted, I don’t blame you if you didn’t buy it. Or if you did once, but lost interest in it. Truthfully, I don’t blame you if you don’t buy any of this. If you just put the damn thing back where it came from like you can because I swear to God, it’s as painless as closing a tab down. Just shut the book. Just walk away. Just get the fuck on with it and don’t waste your time with my mistakes because—I don’t know if you didn’t already notice—but Phil isn’t around anymore to preach his “ _might as well_ ” bullshit.

And that’s because we _can’t_ just do whatever.

We _can’t_ just play pretend.

This is real fucking life and we were real fucking people and, hell, you’re not the only ones who forgot that.

But he was everything to me.

Some place, somewhere, he was everything.

And if you only take one thing from this, let it be that.

But, either way, it changed nothing.

We tumbled head first into the-year-of-romanticsed-tragedy like we knew no goddamn better and, for that, we deserved everything we got. Or maybe he didn’t, but I fucking did. Two thousand and twelve doesn’t ring out in my head so loud anymore as the worst it ever got because I consider myself an example of the fact it can always get worse. Of course, it was a god fucking awful period for us. And, at that point, it was the worst it ever had been. I guess it isn’t relevant right now that it got much worse.

What I’d first felt at twelve and thirteen as an outcasted teenager, I felt again at twenty-one. Nothing was worth what it broadcasted itself to be worth, I thought, and I struggled to understand the reasoning behind why nothing was ever truly what it wanted to be. The heat of the ever-intensifying spotlight over our heads increased to the point of near suffocation and the fingers of claustrophobia clawed at my windpipe, itching to get out from where I kept everything under my collar. Out of sight, out of mind. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have gone back to college. And I’d have clung to Phil’s shirt with every fibre of my being in the hopes of pulling him down with me because one day—when we were washed up on the shore and coughing the water from our lungs—he’d thank me for getting him out whilst he still believed he could swim.

But back then, I just used people to get myself by.

Back then, I called it liquid courage.

And my mother called it a lack of confidence.

And they called it depression.

And Phil called it too much.

And they all wound up being true, in their own fucked-up way, and they all got a chance to eventually present themselves. But the one most accurate to this scenario was, indeed, “too much.” Because it was. And when we lack the many words complicated situations demand us to have, it’s better to just prevail in the face of hardship with the complete opposite and not give enough. With “too much”, I admit that I drank a lot and I lacked self-esteem and I should have just gotten help with my mental health before I had more than a list of reasons to.

The negatives outweighed the positives.

Phil’s occasional displays of affection went from comforting to confusing to horrifying. And he wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t my best friend, he was just the person I existed alongside to please everyone for another ten minutes. Every week, or every month. I became cold around the edges like I had with my parents so many years before, turning away from his patience and spitting back at his compassion. He wasn’t something I couldn’t bear to lose, he was just irritating and suffocating and I didn’t want to be around him.

He had it all wrong.

You had it all wrong.

What you have to understand about this period of time is that we weren’t playing characters because we didn’t yet know how to do that. And your words were as threatening to me as the ones they’d used at school, in the hallways and the locker rooms and all the way out the gates. You were kind in the same tone that you were cruel, representing the internet as a complete contrast of itself. I drank to bide my time, to procrastinate my state of mind and my sexuality. I’m aware it was wrong, but there’s rarely a morality check involved in these things.

They just kind-of happen.

And we just kind-of self-destruct.

And the world just kind-of watches with this confusion as to why we grow up unable to understand why we struggle to see the good in good people.

When in doubt, I’d say his name under my breath. If I’d have been a poet, I’d have written it on the back of my tongue and swallowed enough alcohol to need to get it out of me. After the invasion of privacy, nothing was ever the same again. The clocks continued to tick and the numbers continued to grow and the earth continue to turn but, Phil and I, we were just never the same.

It felt a little like being assaulted, like scrubbing him from me in the shower and always feeling sick. I know it’s a ridiculous and unfair comparison, but it was a truly fucking disgusting thing. Old messages dug out and tossed like evidence under our noses. _I was almost vomiting butterflies_. Trouble in paradise. My hand on the small of his back. The buttons at the top of his shirt. Those posters he stuck to his wall. The station and the Manchester Eye.

I tried to drown my fucking sorrows and I didn’t know what I wanted.

Phil, was probably the simple answer. Was probably always the _only_ answer, amongst maybe a second shot at a lot of things. But the more I longed for all he was, the more I didn’t deserve it. And I understand in my own peculiar sense that people have strange ways of going about getting what they want, and sometimes it has less to do with success in that field and just more to do with failure in others.

In two thousand and twelve, I kind-of just self-destructed.

And the world kind-of just watched with this confusion as to why I’d grown up unable to understand why I struggled to see the good in good people.

And I know I promised honesty and I know you want the details but, goddamn, this is as raw as this year gets. I stopped eating and I called my mom a lot. I slept alone and warned Phil about crossing the line and didn’t answer him when he asked me why I was finding it so hard to get through even just the easy things. I was selfish and unimportant, cold in the warm places and warm in the cold and all right but all wrong and a little bit too emotional. I should have been a lawyer. This YouTube thing just wasn’t working out. I took metal to my skin and shamed my fucking body because I _didn’t_ and I _couldn’t_ and I _wouldn’t_.

We feel of our own accord, I guess.

For the first time ever, I could have died and I wouldn’t have minded. I wasn’t afraid of it. From early childhood, the sheer mortality of life had plagued my attention but, suddenly, it didn’t terrify me and, suddenly, only everything else did. Phil knew of my fascination with death from previous conversations years before, but it was different now and he knew that when I told him the thought of fucking perishing didn’t bother me.

“In fact,” I said. “I’d like it.”

And whether or not at this point I was suicidal still stood to question, but I assume I probably was. In the sense that, should one day in the future have proved too much and I took it too far, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

Which is probably what I hated so fucking much.

And probably what we all do.

Despite how hard it was that year, Phil was always there. He took the liquor out of the fridge and made sure I ate everyday and held me when I cried, even though I was apparently repulsed by the very idea of him touching me. In the beginning, you see, the tide keeps fucking coming and the waves keep fucking crashing and it’s never going to get any easier. To remain stable on your own two feet and not let the current take you under demands an enormous amount of strength but Phil and I didn’t think about that. We didn’t think about the fight we were putting up. Instead, all we thought about was the fact that getting up after you’ve fallen down is always worse than holding onto the will to remain standing.

Because I didn’t care about anything.

And we weren’t the people we wanted to be.

And it wasn’t about _truth_ anymore, it was more about business.

In two thousand and twelve, self-destruction had a price.

Because they threw us in the deep end before they taught us how to swim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How are you finding the story so far? It’s really interesting to me writing it, and it’s the first thing in a while I’ve enjoyed. Just so you know, it will pass present time (2018-ish) soon and go on into the future. Which is when things begin to go very wrong, and the fictitious money-crazed Dan and Phil become relevant. Heads up for original characters coming this way.


	3. Mediterranean

**3\. Mediterranean**

_In two thousand twelve, it was all about closed doors and seeking out privacy_. It was ironic, as such, because we didn’t have any so we made it more about the little things than we did about the grand schemes. I was aware that I was difficult, but it felt like I had no control. As much as I knew pathetic comments from anonymous teenagers shouldn’t have been allowed to get under my skin, they were. And they did. And the first time Phil and I confronted it, it was cold outside. He’d spent two minutes pouring the bottles of whiskey down the drain that night that his parents had bought him for Christmas because he was terrified I was going to drink myself to death or something, and I was terrified he was going to stop me.

The first time we confronted it, I didn’t listen when he told me to bend. 

“You can’t snap,” he said, over coffee and cereal and a white morning. “You can’t _keep_ snapping. You have to go where the wind takes you, you know? Follow the current.”

I remember I scoffed at him. “That’s terrible advice.”

And I remember he sighed. “Why is that terrible advice?”

“Because it is. You’re telling me to do what I want to do? You’re telling me to take the path I _want_ to take? That road leads right on down to a fucking cemetery, Phil, and I don’t think you want—”

“I was suggesting you take the path you’re supposed to take.”

The laugh I gave was somehow harsher than the look in my eyes. “And what fucking path is that? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Phil, this whole fucking fiasco is because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. How can you sit there and tell me to do what I’m supposed to do, after everything I’ve said to you? You never listen, I swear to God. You never listen.”

I didn’t mean that. I never got a chance to tell Phil that I didn’t mean half of the things I said that year but, even if I had done, he’d have sworn it was okay. He was the kind-of person that cared less about what happened and more about what should have, saw the intention in the outcome and the good in the bad. In hindsight, he was always naive. For as long as I knew Phil Lester, he was naive. And he was careless and he was stupid and he didn’t think before he did things, but I was just as much guilty of that as he was. We were equally responsible, I suppose, for particular things. Phil was raised differently to how I was however and, somehow, that’s relevant. Whilst his father was occasionally strict, his mother had a tendency to let shit slip and he was raised by a pair hideously dynamic. They showed the kind-of interest into both his personal and business life that mine didn’t and, in the beginning, would invite us over every few months for dinner. They were polite and courteous, strictly family-oriented but offensive in their inclination to open the door for those in need of it.

I used to wish that my parents were more like Phil’s. I used to wish my mother would learn to adopt the sort-of smile you could hear in her voice and wish she wouldn’t appear as though worn around the edges. With selfish pleas for better times, I’d wish the depression out of her system and the knots out of her hair and the imprints of exhaustion from under her eyes. I wasn’t old enough to understand yet that she was still my mother regardless of how sad and regardless of how sick, and my father was still my father regardless of how little he gave a fuck when I most needed him to. It’s easy, I find, to pray for the things the things we have don’t have. In amongst all of that praying, we forget that we have them at all. I don’t intend to teach you lessons with these words, but instead to create a manifestation of the steady comprehension we learn from our mistakes. This world isn’t about getting it right the first time for, if that was case, there wouldn’t be a first time.

Because there would be no point.

At twenty-one, I was envious of Phil just as much as I was in awe of him.

He was kinder than I’d ever learnt how to be and was sure enough of himself to shuffle out of his comfort zone without immediately pining over the return. He censored his humour but it was nevertheless contagious and he was selfless just as much as was healthy. Which, again, was something I didn’t understand. My ignorance was concealed by a plethora of ambitious vocabulary and a voice so pretentious, it cried out for pity.

I made myself feel sick.

I hated the way I spoke and I hated the way I handled shit, but I continued to speak and continued to handle shit anyway. I was so self-aware and so sick with humiliation that I matched my shamefaced nature with an ego big enough to eat it up.

And that was the recurring theme of two thousand and twelve.

I drove myself, fairly literally, insane.

“I spend hours listening to you,” Phil said to me in the kitchen that morning. He was looking at me, I remember, with this betrayal blanched out in the blue of his eyes. He was looking at me with his fingers tight around a mug, as though clutching to the physical embodiment that we both weren’t what we used to be and both needed something more to get us by. The coffee was strong in the back of my throat and I fucking hated the stuff.

“Apparently, you take none of it in.”

“That’s not true, Dan,” he said. “That’s not true. I’d do anything to make you feel better and you goddamn know it, too. I’m just trying to understand what’s wrong. You’re sad and you’re pissed off at everything and I’m not what I used to be to you and I don’t understand why. Nothing changed, did it? What changed? This whole thing feels like—It feels like looking at a replica of a painting and trying to decipher why it’s a replica. It feels like I’m not supposed to notice something is different, like you don’t want me to. Like you’re expecting me to just go on as if everything is the same but nothing is, okay? Nothing is.”

And then I started grinding my teeth and Phil said, “Sometimes I think it’s like the whole world has flipped on its axis and nobody but me realises it. And it’s scary, Dan, it’s so scary. Everything is just slightly out of place, like the seconds it takes for the traffic lights to switch from red to green and how close people drive to the road markings. Nobody notices, but I do. I hate that I do. I wish I didn’t care.”

And Phil Lester had never been one for poetry, but somehow he made sadness so. In the moments I was my loneliest, he spoke like Camus on the eternal summer and stitched a presence into an absence I’d known for so long. I find there was always little romance to the void in my chest but it bled red for him nevertheless, when he stopped buying me roses and stopped kissing my lips and didn’t say he loved me but instead said my company was the best he’d ever had.

These were the things I valued about him. These were the things I should have been more vocal on valuing about him, but I just wasn’t and I never really made up for that. I treated Phil exactly how he didn’t deserve to be treated that year and though he wasn’t the kind-of guy to make his hardship apparent, I knew he struggled. I knew he ached where he swore he didn’t and burned under the stiff collar of a colourful shirt and there was only so much one person could take, I told myself, as a punishment for the words I’d spat. It was a cycle of dangerous self-destruction in which the gears got clogged with remorse for the people I’d hurt without meaning to hurt, and I had done just because they were in the way of a shooter’s aim. I made excuses for myself and ignored others’ advice and refused to play the game if the game involved a chance of success. I was so fucking hungry for defeat that I could have ruined everything around me and felt nothing.

It wasn’t until two thousand and thirteen that I got the help I needed. Before that year, I’d seen a total of six therapists. My mother took me for a psychiatric report when I was a teenager and the other five times were all above the age of eighteen. Phil would always be the one to insist I go, stressing the importance of mental health to me and that it was better to be safe than sorry. He was the one closest to me and he knew there was something wrong, regardless of how many times I’d swear it was nothing. And I’d swear it was just me, and if he couldn’t fucking deal with it then that was his problem. I never admitted to him that, each time, I’d list my symptoms and the doctor would face me with a hand on his brow and a dash of empathy on his lips and suggest, “Maybe you’re depressed.”

I hated the way the word sounded in the silence of the medical room. I hated the way they looked at me and I hated the way they made me feel. As a child, I refused to talk when my mother sent me to an appointment. The lady had kind eyes but I didn’t know what she wanted and she terrified me. When I returned home, we didn’t talk about it. My parents didn’t know how to approach the subject. And they were kept very hush-hush, these things, on the other side of closed doors and on the outside of our home. We whispered and tiptoed, not in fear of damaging me further but in fear of being heard with a diagnosis under our breath. I don’t accuse them for a minute of being ashamed but, of course, it never did get out to family friends and distant relatives that I starved myself and skipped hours of education at the excuse of it all just being too much. And I think, maybe, if it was made as big a deal as it should have, things would have been different.

My mother rarely spoke of her own problems, however, so the probability of that happening was always unlikely.

We were similar in such ways, I believe, it not being in our nature to crave attention. Regardless of what you’ll make of what you’ll come to read, I urge you to please trust me when I tell you that I didn’t plan it. However it may seem, I didn’t and I swear that. My childhood wasn’t synonymous with affection and those raising me were unstable each to their own degree, but what happened wasn’t the product of mistakes pushed into their own dusty corners of my past. It was a terrible fucking misunderstanding and my mother isn’t to blame and my father—no matter our antipathy—isn’t either. Not Adrian, not old friends, not the kids at school who kicked the shit out of my confidence or the therapists who gave up on me before I even opened my mouth.

Actions have consequences, Dan.

Look around at what you fucking made for yourself.

Isn’t it pretty, asshole?

It was two thousand and thirteen the first time I told Phil I never meant to hurt him. This wouldn’t be the only time, but I feel it was the most important. What we said to one another when the lights went out still mattered then and he didn’t look at me like there was something missing. Two thousand and thirteen was the year we realised what mattered most was knowing one another, not the exact terms of our connection. A relationship or a friendship, it just didn’t matter. We talked more often than we had for the last year but we kept our distance and, for that, I think I’ll always be to blame.

I forced him to realise that sometimes the world is unkind for no apparent reason, and sometimes it just doesn’t matter how much you love somebody. You can’t adore the sickness out of their bones and you can’t drown your sorrows in a gallon of the sweetest liquor because the misery doesn’t fade, it just fucking remains like the bottom of a sloshy canvas, drenched in filthy rainwater. And the world is still ugly and the winters are still long and the people are still cruel when the people have no fucking right to be. Phil Lester always deserved more than the things loving me taught him and, though I had no goddamn right, I played his heart like a fool. I used him for his compassion, his goodwill and his patience because I didn’t have to know the boundaries to know how far they extended.

He fell in love with a stupid kid and he wouldn’t leave me for the world.

I believed that once.

“I’m sorry,” I said, with a voice like the picture of one of those grainy vintage movies. It was dark in his bedroom and I still loved him for reasons we no longer spoke of, for the music we drank beer to in two thousand and nine and the times he cleaned the vomit from my shirt in two thousand and twelve. “I didn’t mean for what happened to happen, not any of it.”

I remember I was sat on the end of his bed and he’d probably been trying to sleep. “Dan,” he mumbled, and paused for a moment. I could hear him gather his thoughts, or something. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

I stared ahead of me into the darkness. “Yeah, Phil. I’m fine. I can apologise with no reason other than wanting to, you know? I was wrong and I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” he whispered.

And I didn’t know what to say.

“Last year, I guess. Recently. Everything. I could have been a better friend.”

And I think, for the most part, Phil and I understood that. I doubt I’ll ever be able to accurately convey the way in which we did, but we did. In the years to come, “I could have been a better friend” would never again scrape the surface of existence but, I swear to God, it lingered there on our lips. When I’d wake to him crying and it was like I’d never known him and when he’d dream of me dying and not feel a thing, we’d both admit in silent voices laying in the echoes of ‘nothing’ (and nothing and nothing and _I’m sorry I didn’t fight for you_ ) that we could have done more. And we could have tried harder and we could have been happy and we watched it dawdle on two feet when we closed our eyes to sleep.

Two thousand and thirteen was the last human year.

“It’s okay,” Phil said. “You’re getting help now. That therapist is helping, right? I’m not—I’m not asking for information, I just want to be sure. I want to be sure you’re getting the treatment you need.”

“I am,” I told him, because I was. It was something and, this time, that was enough. “I just wanted to say sorry. I don’t think I ever have and I should have done.”

“Dan, it’s fine,” The bed sounded as Phil shifted and, for a moment, I swear I thought he was going to touch me. Because the air was lighter than it had been for months and the city on the other side of the glass was the distracting kind-of loud and we didn’t have to think about anything but each other. Two thousand and thirteen, however, was the year of therapy and the year of hope. Though we’d never really dated—or always had but never known it—it felt like we’d gone our separate ways. With Phil and I, the catch was usually that, if one were to kiss the other, the other would kiss back. Regardless of circumstances and regardless of consequences, there was no question about it. But the difference after two thousand and twelve was that spontaneous kisses were non-existent, and Phil wasn’t waiting for me in the way that I was him.

In the grand scheme of things, he just wasn’t chained to what we had like I was. Because I’d grown into him how a child would a parent, attached at the hip and mirroring their actions and he was everything I needed to know and everything I did. And since I’ve spent so much time alone in recent years, I’ve learned a lot about myself. At fourteen, my mother probably didn’t intend for me to overhear her conversation with my grandmother on the landline when she admitted that she thought solitude was my problem.

“He’s lonely, Mom,” she said. “He just seems so lonely.”

And, ultimately, she was right. I was and always have been. But the real problem, I find, isn’t that I want to be loved. The real problem is that I want to feel like I deserve to be. And in two thousand and thirteen—as Phil growing distant from romantic feeling became synonymous with getting better—I first began to understand the unhappiness such superficial idolisation brought me. I didn’t want to be idolised and I didn’t want to be loved from afar, but I doubted I’d ever be emotionally stable enough to experience a love any closer. When boredom rolled in like an inconvenient tide and washed up a colourless creativity, I sat around in self-pity and pondered myself. Was it just human nature to crave what I both couldn’t have and didn’t deserve, or was it somehow possible and one day I’d stumble upon it when least expecting to?

The latter was very unlikely.

Loneliness was something Phil and I never spoke about, not throughout all our time together. And we spoke about some shit, him and I, from the credibility of internet crazes and the YouTuber most likely to be snorting coke to the reason why he tried so hard to please people.

(Which had more to do with others and less to do with himself than you might think.)

Despite how comfortable we were with one another, loneliness was an issue I just took in my stride. It couldn’t be helped—certainly couldn’t be solved—and I’ve wandered before your eyes for all these years believing that happiness just isn’t for me. Even on the good days I thought it, when we stood below landmarks and posed in posh restaurants with cuisine we couldn’t pronounce and spotlights that shone too bright. I thought it in the same way an artist would, cashing in on the sadness they paint onto paper but still never able to afford the loss of that. Because sadness is a muse for so many of us, kids, and we get by never being able to understand anything about ourselves but how we interpret sorrow. How the breeze sounds against the windows and how voices drown one another and how we don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt but we leave it on the fucking page.

In two thousand and thirteen, my therapist told me to start keeping a journal. So I did. And eventually it wasn’t pointless, it was a way to decode the pattern of my cognition. It was an accumulation of otherwise media-shy words, shit that the scripts to my ‘honest and realistic’ set of videos never contained. Because—news flash—we were shameless fucking liars in those. The music was manipulative and the communication even more so, and it wasn’t until the website became a platform for dishonesty disguised as social status that Phil and I realised the position we were in.

Two thousand and fourteen.

I still straightened my hair and he still said what he pleased (despite the censoring) and we still spoke of the kids we used to be, recalling and using them as inspiration for our future selves. Though things were relatively similar, Phil and I slept in separate rooms and didn’t reach out to one another in the physical respect we once had. He was too nice to admit it, but I knew it was because he feared how the close proximity affected me. He feared what it did to my mental state and, with this detail, I felt so fucking weak. From a psychiatric perspective, I was improving. But the damage I’d done to our harmony was undeniable for those listening and, goddamn, none of you were. We became a single wrong key in an otherwise perfect rendition and used tedious TV shows to fill the empty silence, speaking volumes on the fact we didn’t want to acknowledge how we’d changed. It wasn’t awkward, necessarily, but instead just much simpler to ignore its existence and so we exhausted the importance of distraction against acceptance and cranked up the volume and made bits of small talk.

I mean, honestly, it was all we could do.

Ignorance is bliss.

When the cameras were on, we acted. Dan and Phil were characters, the ones that sold the merchandise and the ones that smiled in photographs. Two thousand and fourteen wasn’t a bad year, by any means, but it all seemed to begin then. Like as a child when I span the globe and stopped it on the first country I was to visit at eighteen, unaware of the fact that I had a seventy percent chance of ending up in the ocean. And I did, as a matter of fact, if I recall it correctly. Somewhere in the midst of the Mediterranean. And though there’s little relevance to that here, it does seems appropriate to mention when embarking upon the tale of how I happened to lose everything, and how I ended up where I once—just once—considered I would.

You know, there was a great quote Phil recited to me this one day. When he read, it was rarely much, but it was with a fucking passion. He’d have to refrain from beginning a text on a short flight or a car journey, one for the travel sickness and two for the inevitable determination he clung to to finish what he’d started.

The novel was one from Ray Bradbury— _Fahrenheit_ something but, Christ, Ray, don’t fucking sue me—and that old line went a little like, “If you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.” I remember Phil showing me his copy, waving it under my nose with this smile on his face. It was two thousand and fourteen, and I know that simply because of how peculiar I found the fondness in his eyes. Peculiar like déjà vu, or a stranger with the same name as an ex-lover you haven’t seen for years. On the page, Phil had taken a pencil and underlined the phrase over a dozen times. The shade of grey was soft at the edges and harsher where he’d stressed it on those twelve (probably thirteen) occasions and it contrasted with the book’s yellow tinge. It appeared like the product of mania or delirium, something out of a fucking comedy sketch like a dementia patient tying string around their finger.

 _Don’t forget_ , it said. Phil wasn’t even thirty and everything he did said _don’t forget_. Calendar reminders and noisy pop-ups and photographs of everything, tied down by the weights of social media.

I can still see it now, that book.

“Why have you gone over it so many times?” I asked, taking the book from Phil’s hands. I turned the page. “You’ve literally carved through the fucking paper, Phil.”

He rolled his eyes. We were sat on the couch and he was resting on his knees like a child awaiting a gift, or some shit. “You’re dramatic,” he said. “You always focus on the wrong thing. Can’t see what’s right in front of you. The _quote_ , Dan. Read the _quote_.”

And so I recited it, and smiled. Then I admitted that it was pretty in a way he apparently interpreted as mediocre and remarked, “I think it’s genius. It’s wise, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wise. Sure.”

“ _Dan_.”

“ _What_?”

“It made me think of you. It’s something you’d say. Or would have said, years ago. This is a conversation we would have had years ago. Poetry was our thing.”

“I don’t think poetry was ever our thing, Phil,” I said, but the topic of reminiscence was enchanting to me.

“We tried, give us some credit.”

“Everyone _tries_ when they’re in love.”

It was a funny fucking thing to say, I know. And although it was true, I was grateful for the shrug of Phil’s shoulders and the, “I think it’s quite nihilistic,” he gave when he took the book back.

“Woah,” I breathed. “ _Vocab_. Everyone knows you studied Language, dork. Just wanted to make it clear, huh?”

“It’s not even that ambitious a word. And it’s not about language, it’s about philosophy. I know I’m optimistic and all that but, like, there’s such a thing as a hopeful nihilist, right? A positive one.”

“Yeah, there’s such a thing.”

“Exactly,” he said. “So I’m that. Or, at least, this quote is that. I think life is kinda empty, Dan, and we need something to fill it. It’s not a matter of _if_ we drown, it’s _when_. What if growing is drowning? What if the older we get, the quicker we sink? Sure, everyone dies eventually, but I think I’d rather go out knowing I did everything not to. Knowing maybe I wanted to, but it’s too easy being passive. In the middle of the Mediterranean, you swim or you drown. It’s nihilistic because, in the end, both are pointless. But I think we should always try.”

And, for whatever reason it was at that time, I just didn’t argue with it. I didn’t agree with it, not by any means, but sometimes Phil Lester said things in such a way that it didn’t matter what he was saying. It didn’t matter what he was intending or matter who he was addressing, it was just very simple, like the absence of ‘unrealistic’ in a child’s dictionary. It wasn’t to be questioned and wasn’t to be tampered with, for a decency of such excellency could only be admired. Those that envied him were fairly ordinary, knowing they were more inclined to do bad than good. They longed for the self-control he had, the confidence not in himself but in his actions and his impeccable ability to disregard pain if it was an inconvenience to others. If it’s still something you’re yet to gather, I don’t believe for a motherfucking second that I deserved the boy I met at the station in two thousand and nine. If there’s any truth to the notion that opposites attract, and the damaged need the whole both for the experience and the support then I doubt I’ll ever hear a better argument for life being unfair. Regardless of how much I may have needed Phil and how much he may have had the greatest impact possible on my life, I’ll never believe that he needed me. And I’ll never believe that the world wouldn’t have done just fine without that impact.

On the Mediterranean, I believe I would have drowned. When spinning a different globe as a child, Phil Lester’s finger too had a seventy percent chance of stopping in the ocean.

The difference is that he would have swam.

And I know I was momentarily disregarding the grand schemes, but this just has to be said. In the grand scheme of things, he would have survived without me. If I was still subject to any kind-of psychiatric help, I’d be told that that was an underlying cause of the remorse. That I interfered when maybe my life depended on it, but it only resulted in a fucking mess of his and it’s usually the most selfish amongst us that don’t like to be reminded of said selfishness. So, please, don’t fucking remind me. Just know that I’d rather have died at eighteen than experienced this. Because all I have as a token of its success is an amount of money to my name, and everything else stands to prove that we really fucking fucked up.

Despite our distance in two thousand and fourteen, I realised for the first time throughout that year just how formidable our compatibility was. Even in the silences that came as sticky as bubblegum pulled from between teeth, we worked. Synonymous with routine and always more willing to function beside one another than beside anyone else. We just made sense, Phil and I, and that had been the key to our success. And though this thought of mine was ultimately what destroyed us, it was a damn nice one to sleep on for a while.

The years of two thousand and fifteen, sixteen and seventeen were all vaguely similar but each held their own remarkable rewards for us. We overcame personal obstacles and achieved the continual approval of an ever-expanding audience. This, despite individual internal struggles, was suddenly the most challenging thing of all. During these three years, our names became a brand deal and our relationship even more so. It was my name before Phil’s—in block text on the sweaters and the backpacks and the websites—and childish, overused references tossed into scripts. Previously, the term ‘scripted’ when referring to the content of our videos was used rather lightly. Now, however, it was (more or less) _all_ prepared. Premeditated, if you will, and I’m not only aware of every violent connotation of that word but I also intend for each one to strike you.

Our London flat was a sort-of set, and it was the grandest of its kind. Like a home with only three walls, everything was intentional and nothing was a mistake. No slip of the tongue or misplace of unreleased merchandise had even the potential to be a mistake, for apparently we could manipulate almost any situation to work in our favour.

In two thousand and fifteen, we wrote and released a book. You all know the goddamn title. It was stupid and pathetic and we didn’t particularly think it through. It acted as the foundation for our upcoming tour, and that was all we fucking cared about. That was the greatest marketing plan. Whilst, admittedly, we did dedicate hours to the piece of shit, it wasn’t an exertion of creativity. It was just a catalogue of moderately entertaining stories from our pasts, that we exaggerated and lied about and used for publicity. Of course, we left out all the heavy parts.

Contrary to popular belief, people like Phil and I don’t ever lead lives like the ones we said we did.

“Nobody wants to read about the bad stuff,” Phil told me and, by that, he was referring to adolescent trauma. To the death of his friend in university and his mother’s cancer scare and how I used to starve myself in the name of feeling better. “They’re kids, most of them, or adults looking for a positive pastime. You don’t watch ‘Spongebob’ or ‘Sesame Street’ for a thrill or a bloody putdown. We want to represent the good times, Dan, be an area of the internet that isn’t depressing or disturbing. We always make light of the dark stuff—a joke of murder and sexuality and mental health—and it isn’t offensive, but it’s refreshing. I want to carry on being refreshing and a place for people to turn to when they just want a bit of peace.”

I was sat at the desk in my bedroom, typing up words on the screen. “Please, don’t compare what we do for a living as grown men to children’s TV shows. And, for the love of God, our intention can’t be to make jokes of that kind-of stuff. You get your ass kicked online for that, you know? Trial by media.”

“Alright, well, maybe not a joke then. But just a lighter way of putting it. I mean, come on, Dan. Your channel is founded on angst and sin, and it’s hilarious. You make it into comedy. Successful comedians can make anything funny, without repercussions.”

“It’s not hilarious at all,” I argued. We both fucking knew why the majority of our audience stuck around, and it certainly wasn’t because of the comedy value. “It’s literally mediocre, Phil, above average at best. People will buy this book as a summary, as an insight into the pair of us as a duo. I agree we need to leave out the darker shit because we’re not about that. We should just go as far as quirky teenage angst. But I think we need to make it, you know, more about us. Both of us, together. Our names are gonna be beside one another’s for as long as we’re at all relevant and, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no choice but to bleed this YouTube thing dry.”

Phil was behind me, but I knew he was frowning. I could hear it in his voice after he stalled for a while and remarked, “It doesn’t sound like something you’d be comfortable with, all of this.”

“All of, what?”

“The two of us together.”

“The two of us have always been together. I don’t suggest we stress that, Phil, I suggest we stress the ambiguity. This is a book, it’s a marketing plan. At risk of sounding pretentious, we’re in an industry now. And I don’t think this industry is too fussed about authenticity.”

Phil was silent for a while. He’d been more excited about creating the book than he had been about its release. Eventually, he mumbled, “So, you just think we should play characters,” and I turned to him.

“We’ve been doing that strategically for a while now. I’m not saying it’s got to be too explicit, and we don’t even have to lie. We just exaggerate the truth. Leave out the negative, draw out the positive and magnify our connection.”

And the suggestion was therefore what led to the communication between Phil and I in the book, to the breakdown of the fourth wall and the colourfully printed cover. We intended for a physical manifestation of our time together, and used nostalgia and a weak shock-factor to sway the reader’s interest. You may already consider it manipulation and maybe I don’t just because I know the extent as to which it got to, but I understand if you’re already verging on pretty fucking disgusted. The way we saw it, it was the combined autobiographies of our personas. Our main intention wasn’t to be honest, it was to _entertain_. And it was to _sell_ , above all. Though both Phil and I were there through all of it, I imagine we’d both find it difficult to pinpoint the exact moment we became less about ‘best friends’ and more about a brand.

Some of you noticed it.

Some of you may have more of an idea than me.

But all I know is that you probably purchased the book in two thousand and fifteen and, whether you scoured the pages for hidden codes or merely flitted through it a couple times, you ate that stuff up. We cashed in on what you were hungry for and our tour that exact year came about the same way as how our book did. The stage show—because I simply must address it—was a half-ass attempt at being original. We became very good at those. It was puns and bland humour and what we knew would impress an audience of teenagers, providing they didn’t give it too much thought. We underestimated because it was convenient and the majority of you didn’t seem to mind. We got more out of touring than you, however, a movie and book deals and access to famous landmarks. Everything about it was an experience.

In two thousand and sixteen, we toured America. A lot of social and political shit happened that year and the world became incredibly involved in it online. I recall I put out the occasional tweet, but I tried not to publicly engage. It had the potential to impact my career and Phil advised me against it a few times, remaining thoroughly disconnected from it himself. As it were, we had a successful twelve months. We compiled together photographs and stuck a fucking price-tag on it and, again, accepted the earnings with gratitude. At this point, we still said ‘thank you’ and, though we rarely spoke of it, still tried our best to steer away from the belief of our possible (often probable) relationship. We quite obviously didn’t do a very good job, however, and I’d guess that it was around two thousand and sixteen when it became the equivalent of a third party. There wherever we went ( _let’s sit this distance apart and be caught on camera talking alone at gatherings_ ) and stealing the fucking show because we gave it such power.

In a sense, we _had_ to give it such power. We were footballers and this was the fucking ball and we practised for hours with it behind the scenes before stepping up and delivering the skills.

Give the people what they want, they said.

Pretending had always been so easy for us and the likelihood of Phil and I fucking one another reeled in viewers and sold out shows. Indeed, it was graphic. But, certainly, it was that simple. All we had to do was perform in the roles we’d constructed for ourselves, the product of carefully selected clothes and tweets and nights out. I began to warm to the idea of being with him as we tumbled into another year, knowing that it would never happen as the people we were behind the cameras and, in front of them, it just meant nothing. I was skilled in the art of suppressing what I truly felt for him, which was remarkably easy if you take into consideration the fact that having feelings for him was holding up my career.

It was as messy as it sounds.

Always one with distraction, I splashed cash on expensive shirts and awaited the release of new ‘Apple’ models because ‘careless’ just doesn’t sit on the tongue of the filthy rich. And that’s exactly what we fucking became, suddenly existing in a bubble of artificiality when we made the decision to exploit what had previously horrified us. The thing is, you see, is that it had always been there. We were both just in better states of mind now and clung to sarcasm and _been there, done that_ in such a way that we weren’t afraid to test the waters a bit. It didn’t terrify me anymore and I didn’t cower away like a child behind their mother’s legs at the query, “Hey, are you guys dating?”

None of you noticed it.

I’ll always be of the belief that none of you ever did.

Phil and I were far too private of people to air our dirty laundry and genuine affection out like we pretended to, and that was always what sealed the deal for me. For as long as we behaved in such a way before the camera, our feelings were strictly professional. And, if at any point Phil _did_ develop a romantic interest in me, you’d have been left to assume we broke up. Because the channels would have died and the lights would have faded, both of us unable to truly share that part of ourselves.

But I was a theatre kid.

And I knew a professional relationship was better than nothing, so I played the game and I played it fucking well.

“You know what I like about you, Dan,” It was two thousand and seventeen and there were kids lined up at an event. Phil was fiddling with his phone a little to my right, and this girl I’d never met before was chatting to me like a childhood sweetheart. “You’re so _real_. Like, both of you, you’re just so _real_. I love you so much for it. What are your plans for the future? God, I hope you tour again. My parents couldn’t afford tickets last time. I love you so much.”

And all I said was, “Thank you,” because that often made the most sense and all else required too much thought. And it wasn’t this single request that resulted in it, but we did tour again. One year later. But two thousand and eighteen can wait its fucking turn.

Our friends lost a lot of interest in us, for we were rarely around and declined or sometimes didn’t even both replying to suggestions of collaborations. Before live shows, I’d write a list of topics I wanted to talk about and, if they didn’t come up, I’d just generate a comment in my head and answer it. You didn’t check these things because you couldn’t. There was no way of knowing that we were malicious without ever really intending to be. Considering we’d always been the kind-of friends that blurred the lines, neither of us saw a problem with it. It wasn’t _lying_ , it was _exaggerating_. We weren’t hurting anyone.

In two thousand and seventeen, my mother said that she thought I looked happier.

And Phil said that it felt like everything was finally going to be okay.

Granted, some of you noticed that that was bullshit, predicting the end of the world and suffering the consequences of being called insane. Fame was never heaven, kids, but we didn’t deserve it either way. Amongst the books and tours and apps, we were blind to our mistakes. And I understand now what they mean when they say reality is about truth, and life is about the steps you take more than it is the journey.

Maybe Phil should’ve underlined that quote fourteen times, or something. Because we apparently forgot everything we once believed in, and that people only really try both when they’re in love and when it’s worth it.

What a cliché.

I guess it all comes out in the wash.


End file.
